In the graphic, the air passenger flows are visualized as 1.4 million particles — each one representing 2,000 passengers. Airports are shown as purple spheres, with their size denoting total passenger traffic over the year.

The globe should be running smoothly if your browser is up to date. But if your graphics card is complaining, try the 140,000-particle version.

For the most part, both maps reveal the same major patterns. The world’s air traffic is concentrated in the U.S. and Europe, with a few bright blips in south and east Asia.

What’s not apparent from looking at the smaller map, but is clear when you zoom in on the globe, is that those blips in Asia are actually denser and brighter than any individual route in the U.S. or Europe. The image below shows the U.S. (left) and China / Japan (right) at the same zoom level.

Thin hairs of air traffic in the U.S. (left) vs thick wires in China / Japan (right)

The world’s busiest flight routes are not where you might expect

The busiest routes are not in the U.S. or Europe as you might expect. In fact, no U.S. flight route, those departing from or arriving at any U.S. airport, even cracks the top 100. Denver International to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, America’s most trafficked route, ranks only #101 worldwide.

I'm an NYC-based entrepreneur (my newest project: Blueshift) and adjunct instructor at UPenn. I'm fascinated by data visualization and the ways that data is transforming our understanding of the world. I spend a lot of time with my face buried in Excel, and when I find something interesting I write about it here and also as a Guardian Cities and Huffington Post contributor.More about my background

I think this might only be tracking flights with a minimum number of seats or passengers (say 100).

The diversity of destinations, in Europe at least, is likely due to the way budget carriers operate there, relieving congestion from principal airports.

Analemma

Look how high they are flying: several thousand kilometres altitude. Awesome! 😉

Denti

The info for busiest flight routes seem inaccurate to me even though it is modeled for 2010. The info in this wikipedia makes more sense to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_routes
Although busiest routes are dominated by Asia due to population density, the traffic within US and between US and UK are not far behind at all. And DEN-ATL has no way to be the busiest routes in the US.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Being modeled estimates from 2010, they are certainly not exact. But what Wikipedia shows is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In those tables, the routes are aggregated by city. This globe shows the routes between airports. That puts the U.S. still pretty far back.

Why do you say there is no way DEN-ATL was the busiest route? They are both top 5 U.S. airports, with a big share of domestic flights. Seems logical it would at least be one of the busiest U.S. routes.

Denti

Some of the data in wiki are metro to metro but when I was referring it I didn’t mean the US data comparison. I just want to show the data of Asia routes here are too different from data there. And the data on Wiki page for world is airport to airport.
From flights.google.com
DEL(Delhi) to BOM(Mumbai) there are about 64 flights each day one way. This is the No.1 routes in the graph. However,
GMP(Seoul) to CJU(Jeju City) has 97 flights each day one way. This is the No.1 routes in the wiki page.

The data in US are metro to metro but considering airport to airport the data is still good from bts. Also, the data for ATL can be found here:https://www.transtats.bts.gov/airports.asp
As you can see, DEN is even not on the top 10 list of ATL’s busiest routes. LAX-SFO has 1.8M passengers each year and is the No.1 route.

Albert Ruiz

Beautiful map. Great work, as usual.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Thanks

Takashi Tanaka

Ｉ am a Japanese geography teacher．Ｉ think so great works！

patrick Pilcher

beautifully done but there seems to be a lot of NZ flights missing?

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